DALLAS -

Former defi SOLUTIONS chief executive and award-winning entrepreneur Stephanie Alsbrooks Hanson is embarking on her next foray within auto financing.

On Wednesday, Tricolor — a tech-enabled Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) and one of the nation’s largest used-vehicle retailers that caters to Hispanic consumers — named Hanson as president of newly formed Tricolor Financial.

As part of its mission to transform consumer credit for underserved Hispanic consumers, Tricolor explained this new venture will extend the company’s proprietary technology powered by artificial intelligence through a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 26 million people in the United States are “credit invisible,” and an additional 19 million are “unscoreable,” corresponding to a total of 45 million people in the United States whose lack of a credit score sometimes translates into limited options in terms of accessing financing for a major purchase such as a vehicle.

Tricolor said its pioneering application of AI and other advanced technologies are all part of its integrated used-vehicle sales and financing platform that has helped to deliver high-quality vehicles at affordable rates for low-income, credit invisible Hispanics within this market.

So far, the company has booked more than $1 billion of paper as Tricolor and its affiliate Ganas Auto Group operate more than 40 retail dealerships across 14 markets in Texas, California, Arizona and Nevada.

And now the company has Tricolor Financial in its technology portfolio.

“This is an exciting day for Tricolor as we significantly grow our capacity to fulfill our core mission by launching a new initiative to leverage our capability to ‘score the unscoreable,’” Tricolor founder and chief executive officer Daniel Chu said in a news release.

“I am thrilled to welcome Stephanie to the team as she helps scale this endeavor nationally,” Chu continued. Her experience as a technologist and innovator in consumer lending is unrivaled, making her the perfect person to lead this next phase of mission-driven growth.”

While founding and leading defi SOLUTIONS, Hanson successfully raised funding from Bain Capital Ventures and drew more than 100 finance companies to its mission and platform before merging the business with Sagent Lending Technologies in 2019.

Hanson was recognized as E&Y’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winner for the Southwest Region in 2017 and was named a 40 Under 40 honoree by Dallas Business Journal in 2014 as well as being one of the top industry CEOs highlighted by SubPrime Auto Finance News in 2016.

“I enthusiastically embrace Tricolor’s mission to drive inclusion, and am excited to be a part of Tricolor’s vision to expand its impact serving the financially underserved,” Hanson said.

“Understanding the challenges of launching and growing a business, I look forward to catalyzing new strategic relationships and opportunities to pursue this next important phase of Tricolor’s growth,” she went on to say.